scholarly journals Attempts on the ‘life’ of Johannesburg: Ivan Vladislavić’s Use of the City Portrait Genre

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Double Negative ◽  
Traditional Practice ◽  
The Past ◽  
Changing Practice ◽  
Interdisciplinary Project ◽  
Ivan Vladislavic ◽  
The City ◽  
Selection Of

This article examines the changing practice of urban portraiture in reference to a selection of postmillennial texts written by Ivan Vladislavić. These generically diverse texts trace and reflect on transformations sweeping Johannesburg after the fall of Apartheid, to some extent a metonymic representation of South Africa. An immediate impulse to inquire whether and, if so, how the writer explores the boundaries of portraiture, derives from an explicit textual and visual thematisation of the practice in two of Vladislavić’s works, i.e. the collection of “verbal snapshots” entitled Portrait with Keys and his joint interdisciplinary project, TJ& Double Negative, involving the writer and David Goldblatt, a South African photographer. The article concentrates primarily on the uses and adaptations of the city portrait genre. Vladislavić’s foregrounding of the genre category invites us to consider a series of questions: How does Vladislavić proceed with the appropriation and transformation of the traditional practice of city portrait? Do the portrayals of Johannesburg merely address the past? To what extent does Vladislavić propose contemporary adaptations of the practice? What happens to such categories as realism, accuracy, and likeness? What knowledge does portraiture generate? Finally, the article reflects on whether Vladislavić responds to the need for a new epistemological project in rendering the urban.

Temporal Adoption, Novelistic Prosthesis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew van der Vlies
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
New South ◽  
Double Negative ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
The Future ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
Representative Work ◽  
Ivan Vladislavic

This chapter argues that the work of Ivan Vladislavić offers a sophisticated response to the dangers of selective memory—and memorialization—that characterizes some responses to the disappointments of the ‘new’ South Africa. Using Svetlana Boym’s differentiation (in The Future of Nostalgia) between reflective and recuperative forms of nostalgia, the chapter considers the turn to nostalgia in South African letters, and places in that context the negotiation of a ‘critical nostalgia’ in representative work by Vladislavić—including ‘Propaganda by Monuments’, The Restless Supermarket (2001), Portrait with Keys (2006), and Double Negative (2010). It assesses the usefulness of Walter Benjamin’s work (including the ‘Theses’, Arcades Project, and ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ essay) for engaging with the affective politics and formal provocativeness of Vladislavić’s work, which balances past and future, disappointment and utopianism, a concern with this place and every place.

Apartheid Aesthetics and Insignificant Art

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Stephanus Muller
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
South African ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Art Songs ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Small House ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Selection Of

Stephanus Le Roux Marais (1896−1979) lived in Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, for nearly a quarter of a century. He taught music at the local secondary school, composed most of his extended output of Afrikaans art songs, and painted a number of small landscapes in the garden of his small house, nestled in the bend of the Sunday’s River. Marais’s music earned him a position of cultural significance in the decades of Afrikaner dominance of South Africa. His best-known songs (“Heimwee,” “Kom dans, Klaradyn,” and “Oktobermaand”) earned him the local appellation of “the Afrikaans Schubert” and were famously sung all over the world by the soprano Mimi Coertse. The role his ouevre played in the construction of a so-called European culture in Africa is uncontested. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the rich evocations of landscape encountered in Marais’s work. Contextualized by a selection of Marais’s paintings, this article glosses the index of landscape in this body of cultural production. The prevalence of landscape in Marais’s work and the range of its expression contribute novel perspectives to understanding colonial constructions of the twentieth-century South African landscape. Like the vast, empty, and ancient landscape of the Karoo, where Marais lived during the last decades of his life, his music assumes specificity not through efforts to prioritize individual expression, but through the distinct absence of such efforts. Listening for landscape in Marais’s songs, one encounters the embrace of generic musical conventions as a condition for the construction of a particular national identity. Colonial white landscape, Marais’s work seems to suggest, is deprived of a compelling musical aesthetic by its very embrace and desired possession of that landscape.

YOUTH WELLBEING IN SOUTH AFRICA: WHAT DIMENSIONS SHOULD WE MEASURE?

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dabesaki Mac-Ikemenjima
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Health Education ◽  
Young People ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
South African ◽  
Time Use ◽  
Economic Relationships ◽  
African Cities ◽  
South African Cities ◽  
Selection Of

There is growing interest in the development of measures and indexes of youth wellbeing. However, there has been a limited discussion on indicators to measure and select them. This paper reports on the results of a qualitative study on the selection of indicators to measure the wellbeing of young people in South Africa, and reflects on the relevance of the content of their values in choosing indicators for measuring their wellbeing. The data used in this analysis is based on telephone (9) and email (6) interviews conducted with 15 young people (male=5, female=10) aged 22 to 32 from five South African cities during July 2010. In the interviews, participants were asked to identify five issues they considered important to their lives, after which they were asked to rank them in order of importance. The issues indicated by the participants are described and discussed in six dimensions: economic, relationships, spiritual and health, education, time use and material. The indicators developed from this study are discussed in terms of their relevance for use in a measure of youth wellbeing in South Africa.

A Review of Medical Waste Management in South Africa

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olaniyi FC ◽  
Ogola JS ◽  
Tshitangano TG
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Waste Management ◽  
South African ◽  
Management Practice ◽  
National Policy ◽  
Medical Waste ◽  
African Government ◽  
The Past ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
Medical Waste Management

Background:Poor medical waste management has been implicated in an increase in the number of epidemics and waste-related diseases in the past years. South Africa is resource-constrained in the management of medical waste.Objectives:A review of studies regarding medical waste management in South Africa in the past decade was undertaken to explore the practices of medical waste management and the challenges being faced by stakeholders.Method:Published articles, South African government documents, reports of hospital surveys, unpublished theses and dissertations were consulted, analysed and synthesised. The studies employed quantitative, qualitative and mixed research methods and documented comparable results from all provinces.Results:The absence of a national policy to guide the medical waste management practice in the provinces was identified as the principal problem. Poor practices were reported across the country from the point of medical waste generation to disposal, as well as non-enforcement of guidelines in the provinces where they exit. The authorized disposal sites nationally are currently unable to cope with the enormous amount of the medical waste being generated and illegal dumping of the waste in unapproved sites have been reported. The challenges range from lack of adequate facilities for temporary storage of waste to final disposal.Conclusion:These challenges must be addressed and the practices corrected to forestall the adverse effects of poorly managed medical waste on the country. There is a need to develop a medical waste policy to assist in the management of such waste.

Language and the geopolitics of (dis)location: A study of Zimbabwean Shona and Ndebele speakers in Johannesburg

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gugulethu Siziba ◽  
Lloyd Hill
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Strong Association ◽  
Geographic Location ◽  
Migration Literature ◽  
African Migrants ◽  
Social Positioning ◽  
Language And Ethnicity ◽  
The City

AbstractThe Zimbabwean diaspora is a well-documented phenomenon. While much research has been done on Zimbabwean migration to South Africa, the role that language plays in this process has not been well researched. This article draws on South African census data and qualitative fieldwork data to explore the manner in which Zimbabwean migrants use languages to appropriate spaces for themselves in the City of Johannesburg. The census data shows that African migrants tend to concentrate in the Johannesburg CBD, and fieldwork in this area reveals that Zimbabwean migrants are particularly well established in two suburbs—Yeoville and Hillbrow. The article explores migrant language repertoires, which include English, Shona, Ndebele, and a variant of Zulu. While many contributions to the migration literature tend to assume a strong association between language and ethnicity, the article shows how this relationship is mediated by geographic location and social positioning within the city. (Language, migration, Johannesburg, South Africa, Zimbabwe)*

“Traditional” Venḓa Women’s Beadwork Accessing the Contemporary Tourist Market in South Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-224
Author(s):  
Mathodi F. Motsamayi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Limpopo Province ◽  
The Past ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Trading Networks

Beads and beadwork have played a role in South Africa’s Limpopo Province dating back to the pre-colonial times. Whether the beads were produced locally or imported via trading networks, the region already had a rich tradition of constructing beadwork before the arrival of Europeans. Today, this tradition is continued by new generations of women beaders. It has been found that literature on contemporary Limpopo beadwork produced by Vhavenḓa women is scarce. This article addressed this imbalance. It is vital to state that, during the last decade and in the context of South African heritage and tourism, there has been a steadily increasing number of scholarly studies on Nguni beadwork. This study offered new insights into contemporary beadwork traditions. It also contributed to an understanding of Vhavenḓa beading by drawing on the knowledge and experience of beadworkers, identifying influences from the past, and countering some stereotypical perceptions of beadwork production.

Battered bodies: Characterizing Johannesburg’s apartheid past and present in Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 213-228
Author(s):  
Addamms Mututa
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Past ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Narrative Spaces ◽  
The City

Narratives of traumatic citizenship not only raise questions about the past, but also they give voice to contemporary stories about this past. In post-apartheid South Africa, these questions, markers of apartheid temporality, are embodied in, among other sites, the representation of battered Black bodies in cinema. This article critiques the characterization of Blacks as narrative spaces to illustrate the temporality of distress and trauma from apartheid to post-apartheid Johannesburg in Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi. It argues that the film posits Black characters as latent archives of intergenerational historical narratives that probe the apartheid past and speculate on the post-apartheid future in the city of Johannesburg. Consequently, the juxtaposition of embodied narrative archives and apartheid temporality, the article posits, is a crucial model in the theorization of battered Black bodies’ contiguous nostalgia.

scholarly journals Challenges South African youth face in education and their quest to eradicate issues of the past

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Kim Barnes
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Education System ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
The Past ◽  
African Youth ◽  
Democratic Elections ◽  
Unequal Opportunities

The youth of South Africa today face many challenges in their daily lives. The majority of South Africa's population is made up of youth- people aged between 15 and 35 years old. The youth in South Africa face challenges such as crime, unemployment, poverty, and most importantly unequal opportunities in education. These challenges should not be present in the daily lives of South African youth, especially since it has been over two decades since South Africa’s first democratic elections. The challenges that are faced in the education system is explored and solutions are suggested to help end the chain of poverty.

scholarly journals Legitimation of Poverty in School Economics Textbooks in South Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jugathambal Ramdhani ◽  
Suriamurthee Maistry
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
South African ◽  
Function Analysis ◽  
Further Education ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Critical Knowledge ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Selection Of

In South Africa, the school textbook remains a powerful source of content knowledge to both teachers and learners. Such knowledge is often engaged uncritically by textbook users. As such, the worldviews and value systems in the knowledge selected for consumption remain embedded and are likely to do powerful ideological work. In this article, we present an account of the ideological orientations of knowledge in a corpus of school economics textbooks. We engage the tenets of critical discourse analysis to examine the representations of the construct “poverty” as a taught topic in the Further Education and Training Economics curriculum. Using Thompson’s legitimation as a strategy and form-function analysis as specific analytical tools, we unearth the subtext of curriculum content in a selection of Grade 12 Economics textbooks. The study reveals how power and domination are normalised through a strategy of economic legitimation, thereby offering a “legitimate” rationale for the existence of poverty in the world. The article concludes with implications for curriculum and a humanising pedagogy, and a call for embracing critical knowledge on poverty in the South African curriculum.

The birth of educational archaeology in South Africa

Antiquity ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 74 (283) ◽  
pp. 159-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda B. Esterhuysen
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
African Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
South African Education

Archaeology in education has been introduced in South Africa only recently as the politics of the past precluded the application of archaeology in the classroom. This paper presents the background to South African education and educational archaeology and discusses some of the issues and studies undertaken in South Africa. It also offers comment on the factors which determine and shape educational archaeology of the present and those that may affect the discipline of archaeology in the future.

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